Marina Viazovska is a recipient of one of the New Horizons in Mathematics Prizes 2018 "for the remarkable application of the theory of modular forms to the sphere packing problem in special dimensions." Maryna was a doctoral student of Don Zagier in the MPIM graduate school from 2008-2012. She obtained her PhD from the University of Bonn in 2013.

The New Horizons in Mathematics Prize is an annual prize for junior researchers who have already produced important work. It consists of a monetary award of $100,000. The prize was established in 2016 and is funded by Mark Zuckerberg and Yuri Milner. The awards were announced together with the Breakthrough Prizes 2018 on December 3, 2017 at a gala ceremony in Silicon Valley hosted by Morgan Freeman.

Maryna Viazovska, who conducted her doctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics from 2008-2012 under the guidance of Don Zagier, was awarded the Ramanujan Prize for 2017. Professor Viazovska is honored “for her stunning solution in dimension 8 of the celebrated sphere packing problem, and for her equally impressive joint work with Henry Cohn, Abhinav Kumar, Stephen D. Miller and Danylo Radchenko resolving the sphere packing problem in dimension 24, by building upon her fundamental ideas in dimension 8.” The prize also recognizes her outstanding PhD thesis of 2013 at the University of Bonn in which she resolved significant cases of the Gross-Zagier Conjecture and her work prior to her PhD with A. Bodarenko and D. Radchenko resolving a long-standing conjecture of Korevaar and Meyers on spherical designs, that appeared in the Annals of Mathematics in 2013. The prize notes that the modular forms techniques developed by Viazovska will have a significant future impact in discrete geometry, analytic number theory, and harmonic analysis. It was awarded on December 22 (Ramanujan's birthday), 2017 at the International Conference on Number Theory at SASTRA University in Kumbakonam, India, Ramanujan’s hometown.

Di Yang (MPIM visitor from 09/2016 - 08/2018) and Xuanyu Pan (MPIM visitor from 10/2016 - 09/2017) were each awarded one of the coveted and highly competitive awards from the Thousand Talents Program of the Chinese government. The award consists of a faculty position and funding up to 3 million RMB usually complemented by additional funds from the host university. Di Yang will be based at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei. Xuanyu Pan will be based at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

A number of mathematicians who have held positions, were long-term visitors, or PhD students at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics are invited to present their work at the next International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM), which will take place in 2018 in Rio de Janeiro. Most notably, Geordie Williamson, who has been Advanced Researcher at MPIM from 2011-2016, is invited as plenary speaker. Further invited speakers with ties to MPIM include:

Geordie Williamson has received a New Horizons in Mathematics Prize jointly with Benjamin Elias for pioneering work in geometric representation theory, including the development of Hodge theory for Soergel bimodules and the proof of the Kazhdan-Lusztig conjectures for general Coxeter groups. Geordie had been advanced reseracher at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics from 2011 until August 2016, when he moved to a position at the University of Sydney in his native country Australia.

The New Horizons in Mathematics Prize is an annual prize for junior researchers who have already produced important work. It consists of a monetary award of $100,000. The prize was established in 2016 and is funded by Mark Zuckerberg and Yuri Milner. The prize was awarded together with the Breakthrough Prizes 2017 on December 4, 2016 at a red carpet gala ceremony in Silicon Valley hosted by Morgan Freeman.

The exhibition "Women of Mathematics throughout Europe" will be on public display at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics from November 10 to December 23, 2016. This touring exhibition, whose starting point is the 7th European Congress of Mathematics held in July 2016 in Berlin, features the portrays of thirteen female mathematicians, sharing their experience, thus serving as role models to encourage young women to enter mathematics, a field where women are still largely underrepresented. The exhibition will be launched with the:

Geordie Williamson, advanced researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics, has received one of the this year's prestigious EMS prizes for outstanding young researchers. The prize was awarded „for his fundamental contributions to representation theory of Lie algebras and algebraic groups, for example, with the elegant proof of Soergel’s conjecture on bimodules associated to Coxeter groups and the counter-examples to expected bounds in Lusztig’s conjectured character for rational representations of algebraic groups.“ His results include proofs and re-proofs of some long-standing conjectures, as well as spectacular counterexamples to the expected bounds in others. The prize was awarded during the 7th European Congress of Mathematics held from July 18-22, 2016 in Berlin.